The Fall – Utililsing 3D for Key Illustration

In the last year I’ve grown to utilise 3D tools in my painting workflow. These tools not only help to provide structure and depth to the final painting but also help to bring about fresh ideas for lighting and the ability to change camera angles for thumbnails before settling on the angle for a piece.

The base of this painting was created using procedurally generated shapes to create the rocks in the mid-ground and background and rendered using Cycles in Blender before the paint over and addition of further details in Photoshop. Setting up the scene in Blender allowed me to select the best camera angle, focal length, place my lights and pose a basic 3D model from Adobe Mixamo for the hero character.

As a person who is relatively new to 3D, this base may have taken longer than it would have done to paint the image from scratch, but I believe I wouldn’t have achieved a result such as this and wouldn’t have learned so much had I not tried. Furthermore new pieces created using 3D will get faster and faster as it becomes a natural part of the workflow and familiarity with the tools grows.

Nathan Birchall

Artist
Stoke On Trent… United Kingdom Tel: +44 7802334034www.nathanbirchall.co.u…
Hi there! I’m an Artist and Illustrator from Stoke-on-Trent, England. I create professional artwork for private clients and companies.
My specialisms lie in portraiture and en… Show more.

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About Nathan Birchall.

Hi there! I’m an Artist and Illustrator from Stoke-on-Trent, England. I create professional artwork for private clients and companies.
My specialisms lie in portraiture and environment art and I utilise traditional sketching, digital painting, matte painting, 3D modeling and photo-manipulation to achieve the finished work.
I'd love to hear about your project and how we can work together.